Former NYT Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Has Passed Away At Age 86

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Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who stepped up as The New York Times' publisher in 1963, died in his Southampton, New York home today at the age of 86 after a long illness.

In its obituary this morning, The New York Times remembers Sulzberger's profound impact on shaping both the paper itself, and the very business of news and media:

The expansion reflected Mr. Sulzberger's belief that a news organization, above all, had to be profitable if it hoped to maintain a vibrant, independent voice. As John F. Akers, a retired chairman of I.B.M. and for many years a Times company board member, put it, 'Making money so that you could continue to do good journalism was always a fundamental part of the thinking.'

Mr. Sulzberger's insistence on independence was shown in his decision in 1971 to publish a secret government history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers. It was a defining moment for him and, in the view of many journalists and historians, his finest.

Sulzberger's grandfather, Adolph S. Ochs, who bought The New York Times in 1896. In 1992, Sulzberger handed down the position of publisher to his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.

h/t NYT